Malech Fire in the Coyote Valley area of South San Jose, as seen from an aircraft on Aug. 8, 2026. (Cal FIRE)
A plane spreads fire retardant on a fire in the Coyote Valley area of South San Jose, as seen on Aug. 8, 2026 (Cal FIRE)
Firefighters responded on the ground and in the air to a 32-acre blaze on San Jose’s southern edges near Coyote Valley on Saturday afternoon.
The fire, east of Highway 101, was first reported around noon Saturday in the 9500 block of Malech Road, a grassy, rural area near Field Sports County Park. Between 12:30 p.m. and 1:17 p.m., the blaze spread from 10 acres to 32 acres as winds pushed it away from the freeway and toward the Mount Hamilton foothills overlooking Coyote Valley.
Firefighters from Cal Fire and the San Jose Fire Department halted the fire’s forward progress by 2 p.m., according to Cal Fire’s SCU unit, and by late afternoon Saturday were working on mop-up — the process of dousing smoking areas with water and completely extinguishing remaining embers and other hot spots.
“I would consider it a fairly routine grassfire,” said Megan Robinson, a supervising open space technician with the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority, a government agency based in San Jose. “The firefighters were on it fast. They went at it pretty hard so it didn’t turn into anything worse.”
There were no reports of any injuries or structures damaged.
Much of the land where the fire burned is located on the Coyote Ridge Open Space Preserve, owned by the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority. Until the agency purchased it in 2014, the 1,859-acre property was owned by UTC — United Technologies Corporation — an early Silicon Valley aerospace company that built and tested rocket motors there that powered Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles for the military, as well as NASA spacecraft that explored Mars, Venus, Jupiter and the sun.
Since 2023 the property has been open to the public for hiking, biking, and horse riding.
The cause of Saturday’s fire was under investigation.
The adjacent property, Field Sports County Park, is a shooting range for skeet, trap, rifle and pistol shooting. The only public shooting range in Santa Clara County, it was evacuated shortly after the fire began to send columns of black smoke up over the area.
“It is very popular on the weekend,” said Nadine Abousalem, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department, which owns the site. “There were a few dozen people evacuated.”
Abousalem said the range also will be closed Sunday as fire crews finish mop-up work. The open space preserve also will be closed Sunday, Robinson said.
“There’s dry vegetation out there,” Abousalem said. “It was a grass fire moving uphill toward the ridge. Luckily, no structures were damaged and nobody was hurt. There was a really quick response.”
In 2019, the area burned in a 210-acre, two-day blaze called the Malech Fire.
So far this year, there have been no major wildfires in Santa Clara County. The largest, the Mines Fire, began July 26 in a remote east of Mount Hamilton near the Santa Clara-Stanislaus County line close to Mines Road and San Antonio Valley Road.
That fire, which burned for a week, charred 282 acres with 225 firefighters and 14 engines battling it during its peak. There were no reports of injuries or structures destroyed.